I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to storage containers and, in particular, to a storage container for storing and securing drawings to ensure that the drawings will remain intact at a designated location when their use is required.
II. Description of the Prior Art
In many industrial installations requiring the use of complex machinery and electrical equipment, it is customary for the manufacturer of such equipment to provide the user with a set of drawings that will permit the user to service the equipment as the need may arise, without the necessity of the manufacturer's providing on-site service repairmen. In order to facilitate the on-site repair of such equipment by the user's personnel, it is necessary that, when there is an equipment failure, such personnel have immediate access to the drawings that describe the equipment in detail. It is common for a manufacturer to provide drawings to the equipment user who, in turn, stores such prints in an engineering department remote from the equipment. In many situations rapid repair of the equipment is essential. For example, the equipment may be employed in production assembly lines which are very expensive to close down in order to facilitate repair, or the equipment may involve public utilities or hospitals which have an urgent need to maintain such equipment in constant running condition. Thus, the locating of drawings at a location remote from the equipment is unacceptable.
One solution to this problem has been to provide prints of the equipment at the site of the equipment, and it is a common situation to find the drawings merely positioned in close proximity to the equipment in an unprotected manner such that many persons have access to the prints. It has become a problem in the repair of such equipment that when the appropriate personnel arrives to prepare failed equipment, the drawings that are required to facilitate the repair are missing or otherwise damaged and may not be usable. This results in a considerable delay in the repair of the equipment until a new set of drawings may be obtained.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a means for storing the aforementioned drawings in such a manner which ensures that the drawings will be available to the personnel who require them to repair equipment and which would limit access to such drawings to only those personnel who are authorized to make such repair.